The Atomic Sea: Part Five: Flaming Skies Page 2

  “Why?” Frederick asked. He was staring about at the devastation, clearly in shock. “Why would they do this? They ... they killed everybody. They sealed the city and then ... this ...”

  “Yeah,” said Hildra. “It doesn’t make any fucking sense.”

  Wheels ground on asphalt. Somewhere someone screamed in terror or pain, then was quickly silenced. Something growled. Avery saw a shadow shift in a nearby shop. He tensed, but it did not show itself again.

  “It makes sense.”

  The voice came from the backseat. Avery glanced in his rearview mirror to Layanna. She was grimly studying the destruction all around—the heaped bodies, smashed cars, broken shop windows.

  “How?” said Janx.

  “It was because of me. Frederick was right,” she said. She spoke in a small, hollow voice. “I didn’t know ... how could they have gone so far?”

  “How, Mother?” said Frederick. “How does killing all these people get the Collies closer to you?”

  In the rearview mirror, Avery saw Layanna fix her son with an impenetrable expression. “Their psychics haven’t been able to find me because of all the infected in the city—the background levels of extradimensional phenomena are too thick. They couldn’t pick me out of the noise.”

  Frederick paled. “You mean ... they killed all these people ... just so they could locate you?” When she didn’t answer, he turned back around, shaking his head and saying, “Shit” repeatedly.

  “I’m with Freddy,” Hildra said. “This is fucked up.”

  “Perhaps it was a mixture of reasons,” Avery said. Or a mixture of motives. General Carum’s hatred of the Lai had given even higher authorities the tool they needed to use against Layanna. Avery knew this slaughter had been triggered by something more than simple racism or a general’s desire to punish rioters. Carum’s weapon had only aided the design of someone else, probably Uthua. In any case, Hildra and Frederick were right: it was terrible. The thought of what had been done to Ayu made Avery sick.

  “We’d best hurry,” Layanna said. “The bombing accomplished what they wanted, and soon all the infected people will have died, killed by the gas. I’ll be easy for the psychics to pick out then. We must be gone first.”

  “How many you reckon they killed?” Janx asked. “A million? Two?”

  “Ayu is a city of six million,” Layanna said. “Over half of those were infected. And they are killing the other half. We didn’t realize how bad it was at first because we were in the expatriate quarter, where most people aren’t infected—Octung hadn’t begun making the Sacrament so essential at the time those people left it. But here, in the greater city ... I don’t think there will be many survivors.”

  “I ...” Hildra started. “I think I’m gonna ...”

  She rolled down her window and vomited over the side. The smell of gas rolled in, along with the stench of death. Avery held his breath until she wiped her mouth and rolled the window back up.

  He drove on, guided by a dazed and reeling Frederick. Avery tried not to dwell on the horror of it all, couldn’t allow it to overwhelm him and drag him down. The powers they were up against were ruthless and cruel, without pity or compunction.

  “There,” said Frederick. He pointed above, to a zeppelin moored to the upper reaches of a fantastic building ahead. The zeppelin itself was beautiful, its envelope crimson and its gondola massive and elaborately carved with many Lai intricacies.

  “That’s where we’re going?” Avery said.

  “Behold Paradise.” Frederick spoke like a man going to his doom. “The only civilian airship I know that can come and go from Ayu airspace without clearance. I figured it would be picking people up, getting its clients out of this madness, but that doesn’t mean this isn’t its last stop. We have to reach it before it casts off from that building.”

  “What’s Paradise?” Hildra asked.

  Before Frederick had time to answer, Janx said, “Trouble.”

  A shape had emerged from behind a wrecked bus. As Avery passed the vehicle, he saw a mound of mangled bodies, and out of it, dripping gore, lurched a huge mutant, tall and muscular. At one point he might have been handsome, even beautiful, for he had the colors, striations and some of the ornamentation of a scorpion fish, but now he was a horror. Flanges and poison glands thrust out of his misshapen, blood-covered body, and blood coated his face and chest. His eyes were mad, black things, and when he saw the car approach he threw back his head, let out a great howl and charged them across the street.

  Avery jerked the car to a stop and reached for his gun—too slow. The mutant had already scrambled onto the hood. Frederick swung his sawed-off shotgun and fired through the windshield, hit the creature in the abdomen. It kept coming.

  The monster rushed across the hood and dove at the windshield, meaning to barrel through it, but a large shape leaned forward, huge revolver clutched in hand.

  Janx fired. A roar filled the tight space as the bullet punched through the windshield and drove through the creature’s skull. It flipped backward, off the hood of the car, and landed on the sidewalk with a smack. Blood spurted up, and it did not move again.

  Gun smoke enveloped the inside of the car, and the two roars had been so close to Avery that they had half-deafened him. All he could hear was a vague tinnitus ring and muttered voices that sounded as if they came from underwater.

  Janx sagged back, saying something Avery didn’t catch. When the ringing began to recede, Hildra was shaking him and shouting, “Go! Go! Go!”

  Forms had materialized in the street—slipping from alleys, shops, descending broken embellishments—all drawn by the sound of gunfire. Something still lived in the city, the creatures had realized. Something that remained to be eaten.

  Howling, the gassed mutants ran for the car, fighting each other as they went.

  Avery’s blood rushed cold. He shoved the car into gear and stomped on the accelerator, roaring off with a squeal of rubber.

  A pair of mutants rounded the corner ahead, saw the car and made for it. Avery struck one, who rolled across the hood, hit the frame and bounced away with a heavy smack, and veered around the other. He took the curve, mashing the pedal.

  “There!” Frederick said, pointing at the street ahead. “Left!”

  Dark shapes slipped out of the buildings around them. When Avery cornered, he had to slow the car, and a mutant charged them out of an alleyway, coated in blood, showering droplets as it ran. Layanna rolled down her window and Janx leaned forward, stuck his gun out this time, thankfully, and fired. The mutant flew backward. More shapes massed to their rear. Avery floored it.

  “Right!” Frederick said. “Right!”

  Avery spun the wheel, nearly lost control of the vehicle but kept going.

  “There it is!” Frederick pointed to the building they had seen before. “That’s the one.” Sure enough, the zeppelin was still moored to the structure’s tip. But for how long?

  The area was thick with mutants, all dying, all mad with hunger and pain. They crawled along the ground, stumbled out of alleys, emerged blinking from the broken windows of shops and office buildings. Flies swarmed around them, and blood and filth ran over their bodies, which were large and scaled, or tentacled, or fantastic in a myriad of ways, with translucent, angelic flesh or interiors that pulsed with bioluminescence—but they were all things of horror now, bloody and ragged and dying. They shambled. They howled. They beat at themselves, or tore out their hair if they had hair. Avery saw one man that looked like a beautiful, living reef of coral drag along a corpse by the intestines, which had become tangled around his ankles. All converged toward the car.

  Avery slowed the vehicle as they approached the building that Frederick had indicated, but as soon as he did fists beat at the doors. A deformed flipper-like appendage tried so smash his window. A tentacle thumped against the windshield, leaving smears of blood. Avery plowed forward, knocking the mutants aside. The building reared ahead.

  “Slow down!” Frederi
ck said. “We’ll crash!”

  Avery kept going. Mutants swarmed toward the car, shrieking and convulsing. If Avery slowed, the car would be overwhelmed. Janx, Layanna and Hildra fired without stop, trying to drive the attackers back, unsuccessfully.

  “Brace yourself!” Avery said, and smashed the car directly into the building’s lobby. Glass and metal sprayed everywhere. The car slid, righted and sailed forward, directly into a huge basin of water. They plunged in, hit something metal, and stopped with a shudder. Avery’s heart beat fast. Sweat stung his eyes.

  They had actually come to rest in a fountain, he saw as he struggled to open his door against the water—a fountain with a great sculpture looming overhead, some sort of giant Lai fellow with bulging muscles ringed by nymphs holding out gifts to him, one a flower, one a bird, one a scroll. Water gleamed on the giant’s chest and coated the nymphs’ breasts.

  Avery scrambled from the car, water soaking his feet and ankles. Gunfire rocked around him, and he grabbed for his own gun. Bodies littered the floor, blood pooling all around.

  Mutants poured in through the broken doors. Rage and hunger lit their eyes.

  “This way!” Frederick said, and made for the stairs.

  Janx and Hildra fired their guns at approaching mutants as they fell back toward the stairway, and Layanna and Avery imitated them.

  Frederick ran up the wide marble staircase and cursed impatiently for the others to follow. They did, firing backward as they went. If they moved too fast, they would stumble and it would be over.

  Desperate, shaking, Avery fired and fired. The mutants swarmed up the stairs toward him, sharp teeth spraying spittle, eyes bulging, blood from previous victims caking their faces, their hands, their chests. He blew one’s brains out the back of its head, shot another through the chest, another through the gut. They kept coming—closer, closer, reeking and gnashing and howling.

  The dead mutants soon piled high on the stairway, making it difficult for others to pass. Some, overwhelmed by hunger, began ripping at the corpses with their teeth and gobbling down the still-warm hunks.

  Avery and the others reached the head of the stairs. Visibly itching in impatience, Frederick showed them to a stairwell that led up to each floor of the building; the one they had just left had been as much decorative as functional, but this new one served the whole building.

  They locked the door behind them and fled upward, panting and sweating as the horde bashed against the door below, then broke through. Avery didn’t know how many flights they ran up, but his knees creaked and his legs ached like fire was eating at them by the time they burst onto the top floor, braced the door with a nearby couch and ran in the direction Frederick indicated.

  The zeppelin named Paradise berthed in the upper lobby, moored just outside, and the last few well-dressed guests were just being admitted onto its handsome decks.

  Avery was instantly in awe of the airship. Its envelope gleamed of dark red save for delicate tracings of gold here and there. Its gondola was massive, perhaps five stories high, shining with exotic woods. Countless balconies jutted from it, huge and opulent, golden railings glittering in the sunlight, streamers fluttering in the wind with the bright colors of Laisha, red and turquoise and violet. Figures moved on the balconies, some Octunggen, some Lai. One floor of the structure was ringed by dirigibles tied up at docking bays, most of which seemed to be occupied. All of the dirigibles were of high quality—the elegant, expensive crafts of the wealthy: aerial yachts. Paradise seemed to be some sort of high-end hotel.

  A walled ramp had been extended from a deck just below the docking level into the upper lobby of the hotel, a lobby apparently designed solely to receive zeppelins: the Lai boasted an aerial culture, indeed.

  Music drifted from open doors. How could these people be celebrating? The city had just been destroyed, or near enough.

  The well-dressed guests were admitted onto the craft by Lai figures in colorful livery, salamander-hide outfits with brass buttons and skirt-like bottoms. Avery and the others rushed up, breathless and coated in gore, and the attendants adopted a defensive posture, several producing guns. One barked something in Lai, but when the advancing party did not respond he switched to Octunggen: “Stop!”

  “The infected,” Frederick panted. “They’re right behind us! You must let us on.”

  “No.”

  “But we’ll die.”

  “That’s your problem.”

  Frederick seemed as if he had expected this reception. Suddenly he appeared very weary, and that expression of a man going to his doom returned.

  “Send for Liru,” he said. “He knows me.”

  Janx and Hildra had their guns trained on the attendants who in turn had their weapons trained on them. One spoke into a radio transmitter in rapid-fire Lai. Shortly a man at the head of a small party of robed attendants appeared from down the hall.

  “Liru,” Frederick said, then flinched as one of the gassed mutants coming up the stairwell issued a terrible howl. It had sounded very close.

  “Frederick,” Liru said. “I did not expect to see you today.”

  “Yeah, well, unexpected times and all that. Can we come aboard?”

  Liru paused, then bowed and stepped back. “Please do.”

  They climbed aboard just as the door burst behind them. One of the attendants shouted into the radio transmitter, and the zeppelin began pulling away from the dock. Screaming and ripping at each other, the infected rushed up toward them, and guns cracked along the decks as the attendants drove them off.

  The zeppelin slipped away, sailing through the airspace over Ayu.

  Seeing their quarry escape, the infected vented their fury on the lobby’s furniture and on each other, tearing their brethren to pieces. Then they set to feasting on the corpses.

  Chapter 2

  Avery rested his arms on the gunwale, joining Hildra and Janx in staring down at the city of blue towers. It rose, slumbering and magnificent in the background, while in the foreground drifted dozens, no, hundreds of massive jellyfish, the exotic domes and minarets sometimes visible through them, distorted in strange curves. The jellies stretched in every direction, a sea out of nightmare. Watching the magnificent city, Avery felt his throat close up. I’m so sorry, he thought. This is all my fault. If I’d only killed Sheridan instead of kidnapping her ...

  The queasiness he had felt before came over him again. He doubled over and grabbed his knees, sucking in deep breaths. In his mind’s eye, he saw the mutants rushing up at him on the stairwell, eyes rolling, teeth gnashing, spittle spraying—

  He turned to face the sky. Other Lai dirigibles shared the air with them, ornate and colorful, with exotic landscapes and scenes from folklore painted on their ships’ envelopes. Some had been painted with alchemical substances, and the pictures seemed to glow or even move. There were Octunggen zeppelins, too, stark and military. The Lightning Crest blazed on each envelope.

  Paradise’s attendants had surrounded Avery and the other newcomers in his group but so far had made no move against them, though Avery did not like the way they looked at Frederick. Liru started to speak, but suddenly Layanna gasped in obvious pain and all turned toward her. She grimaced and fell back against the gunwale, then sagged down it.

  Avery crouched beside her. “What is it?”

  Her eyes were blank, her face tightly locked. Her breath came in fast, short explosions.

  “Layanna? Layanna?”

  Still didn’t answer.

  He squeezed her hand, then, when that didn’t work, lightly slapped her face. “Layanna! It’s Francis Avery, can you hear me?”

  She blinked. In a tight, strained voice, she said, “Pressure ... they’re hunting ... must ... block ...”

  A seizure shook her, and her eyes rolled back in her head. She shuddered on the deck, convulsing wildly. Panicked, Avery felt her pulse, then her temperature. What was happening?

  He heard Hildra swear and looked to see that the zeppelin was just passing its
first jelly. The huge, gaseous blob of whitish flesh, with its long, trailing tentacles, dwarfed those on the terrace, and its glow limned Hildra’s face in an eerie light. The acrid reek of its poisons burned Avery’s sinuses.

  “Fucking things,” Liru said.

  Avery could almost feel some sort of mental pressure exerted by the vast jelly, and he remembered what Layanna had said about them.

  On the deck, she shuddered even more violently.

  “Get us away from that thing!” Avery said.

  Liru ignored him, but the zeppelin gradually left the jelly. There were others, though—so many others, drifting, bobbing to unseen currents, a fleet of surreal hunters, conduits for the hidden psychics scouring the city for Layanna. Now that so many mutants had been killed and the rest were dying, it would be easy for them, so easy they were allowing air traffic to exist only because it was child’s play to scan the dirigibles. Now Layanna was bombarded by their energies. She must be overcome at the effort of blocking their searches.

  Sweat beaded her skin, and her face had turned red. Her whole body was flushed and feverish and hot to Avery’s touch. He stared down at her in worry. Please, Layanna, stay strong. You can do it. You can pull through this.

  Maybe she could, he thought. But for how long?

  “We have to get out of here,” he told the others in his party. “This is worse than being on the ground.”

  “We’re stuck, Doc,” said Hildra. “There’s nowhere to go but up.”

  “The only thing we can do is get clear of the city,” Janx said. “Away from the jellies.”

  “Is Madam Zerka available?” Frederick asked Liru.

  “She’s indisposed at the moment.”

  “Just take me to her waiting room. When she’s ready, I’ll talk to her. I’ve got a favor to ask her.”

  “I’ll bet you do.” Liru consulted with his people for a moment, then turned to Frederick and his party. “Come.”

  Layanna’s eyes rolled behind closed lids, and she continued to twitch and spasm. She did not seem to register Avery’s proddings, but when he got his arm under her and tugged her to her feet, she obliged, though she had to lean her weight against him. The men in livery watched her cautiously.